Talking Tech: Evergram leaves video messages for the future

Jan. 2, 2013
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Evergram CEO Duncan Seay. / Jefferson Graham USA TODAY

by Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY

by Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO - Call it the digital equivalent of leaving a message in a bottle. Add a guaranteed broadcast time, and you've got Evergram.

The free website, described as "an everlasting telegram," offers a way for folks to send video messages on a set date - for a wedding, graduation or - heavens forbid - a funeral.

Evergram just got underway in late 2012, and is in private beta now, which means you need to register and await an invitation to join. The site plans to open more widely early this year. (There are also apps for Apple and Android devices, but they won't work without an invite.)

"Pinterest took six months to build an infrastructure," says Evergram co-founder Duncan Seay. "We want to make sure we can handle the traffic and get to scale."

Seay's inspiration was the 1993 film My Life, in which Michael Keaton plays a man with terminal cancer who uses a video camera to record messages to his yet unborn son.

Seay is a cancer survivor himself who during his recovery thought, "What if you could send messages to your kids in the future?"

Fast forward 20 years from My Life. Forget putting a video camera on a tripod, recording, editing and leaving it behind on a VHS tape. Most consumers now have a video camera in their pocket - their smartphone - and easy tools to create a video.

Evergram users record 15-second messages directly into a smartphone camera or computer webcam and select the date for it to be played.

For instance, if a wedding is on June 15, guests are invited to leave congratulatory messages to be viewed on the wedding day. The Evergram calendar is programmed to send the couple an e-mail and present the videos in an online album that's either public or private.

To pull something like that together otherwise, "You'd have to call your friends, they don't know where the video software is, the files are too big to send, and when you receive it, you have no way to put it into a beautiful album," says Seay. With Evergram, "We do that all for you."

Evergram hopes to make money with potential add-ons down the line - gifts, for instance, for wedding couples, teachers, parents or other honorees.

Seay initially raised $900,000 to get the company off the ground from Syncom Venture Partners and former Facebook executive Chris Kelly. The two just kicked in an additional $500,000, and Seay is currently raising more capital as he prepares to open the site to the public.

"I thought the use of video as a messaging platform focused on the future is an idea whose time had come," says Kelly, who has also invested in the private social network Path and online movie service Fandor.

In Evergram's short life, it's learned how to deliver messages for weddings and anniversaries with "thousands" of messages to "thousands" of users, Seay says. But what of his original inspiration - the afterlife?

That has yet to happen, but it could, with some forward thinking.

"Currently, the system is based on a time trigger," he says. "The users set the time for when they want it to appear." Conceivably, you could set a date for your loved ones to receive a message far into the future.